[lbo-talk] Good Education

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Feb 6 21:21:46 PST 2011


Someone mentioned this. So I guess we better discuss it.

But first it has to be understood that NOTHING, not a word, in the College Student thread had anything whatever to do with a good education. And if we are going to talk about a good education it is essential to understand that we don't know what we are talking about. I would not myself venture to say a word on the subject, though I have lots of words to say on what is not relevant to it. And I have even more words to say why we could not create a good education even if we knew what a strange entity was.

We should understand next that in a capitalist world no one is going to get anything that can be flatly called a good education. Give it up.

Good generals don't complain about either the terrain upon which they must fight or the weather of the day on which they must fight. They simply study the terrain and try to figure out what to try. Education, good, bad, or indifferent is simply part of the terrain. If it exists it is an unintended consequence of some other events. As leftists, our duty is to do the best we can to trigger various kinds of anticapitalist struggle - the anticapitalism can be either implict or explicit. Most of them will involve saying No to something or other. In any case, we mount those struggles upon the terrain and with the troops that come to hand. Lenin said something about building socialism with the the human material produced by capitalism. Same thing with any struggle we enter into.

So neither this thread nor the thread on what college students learn has anything whatever to do with politics. It would be utter lunacy to mount a struggle for a "good education."

(And incidentally, no one learns FROM a book. One learns WITH a book. Books are one of the best tools with which to learn, but there are other ways. And what I learned, for example, with Postone's book was radically different from what he himself learned from or with it. And his students only learned to be political lunatics from studying it. But I bet every one of those political lunatics could ace any test on "critical thinking.")

But if nothing intelligent can be said about a "good education," quite a few things can be said about good schools (as long as you keep the superstitions regarding "good education" out of the discussion.

First of all, good schools are schools that are good for the teachers and the clerical and janitorial staff. That is primary.

One can wage a fight by saying NO to the reduction of art, gym, music, etc. teachers. It's not primarily because these things are "good" in themselves, though they might well be. It is because while the kids are off being taught to sing or listen to music the primary teacher can sit and think, or goof off, or grade papers, or whatrever. That makes the school good for teachers.

Good schools, especially good high schools, don't start too early: the students need their sleep. That demand could probably, with a little thought, be defined in negative terms and quite a few parents might get involved init.

No to Merit Systems. They have nothing to do with good schools or any other desirable system: they are a method of labor control. Job security (stop calling it tenure) is good for the workers, and hence good for good schools.

Good school buildings that are a comfort to be in. The thing about good buildings is the message they deliver to the student: They say, "You are important to us. We want you to be comfortable here." That is really important for good schools.

I'm thinking mostly of K-12, for a number of reasons. If students come out of the system feeling good about themselves and their teachers quite a few of them will feel good about learning. They will also feel good about being together with others and chatting about the world. Colleges are not so important: they are produced by the students. But the same basic principle holds, of course: The main purpose of colleges is to be good for the faculty, the staff, the janitors, etc. And they must be free or cheap. It's not good for students to have to carry jobs on the side and earn their way through college. Work generates the need usually expessed as "taper off" or something like that, and the best way to taper off is TV or getting drunk. And somehow leisure has to be generated. Leisure is far more important than how they are taught or what they are taught. The Greek word for leisure was the Greek word for scholar. This also means empty hours in the day so students can have plenty of time to jaw with each other.

Perhaps that's sort of a start for talking about good schools, and getting this nonsense about "good education" out of our vocabulary.

Carrol



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